I'm on my way out: New Year's starts now. So here's one I prepared earlier:
The night is dark. The Christmas lights —
the yellow lights along the river —
bridge lights blue against black water —
carlights, shoplights, phonelight — gather
into a ball of — life, whatever —
something to see by. Happy New Year.
Inspiring because of the awfulness of the event - not because I for some reason don't grasp its gravity.
One of the murdered girls' grandfathers said, "We must not think evil of this man." Not "we don't" - "we must not." It is an effort of will to put principles into practice, and a hard act in recognition that hatred corrupts the person who feels it.
I quote a townsman who told the Scotsman, "We want to forgive... that's the way we were brought up - turn good for evil."
The reaction in Baroque Mansions to the execution of Saddam Hussain is one of such dismay that I have been unable even to organise my thoughts around it properly. The main thrust of my reaction is that the death penalty is a barbarism which corrupts the perpetrators of it far more than it punishes the person on whom it is inflicted. Yes: even more than dying.
I never thought I'd be sad to see Saddam Hussain die, and let me stress that I spare no tears for him now. But there is a humbling aspect to it, as we might do well to remember, especially (as I keep saying) at Christmas. In seeing him die we are forced to remember that he was in fact a human being. The quality of his humanity is not our concern. Our responsibility is to our own humanity.
But just as the governments of the West felt it expedient to meet with this tyrant and shake his hand (as they now shake others; do I need to list them?) they now feel it is meet and seemly to support - even in plases like the UK where there is no death penalty - a punishment which neutralises our stance on his earlier acts. I would have vastly preferred it if we, the West, could have - if only on just this one occasion - acted with dignity and according to our stated beliefs.
Furthermore, the possible outcomes of this particular revenge killing could be dire for all of us.
The bloggers on this occasion have been resonant - though I note a silence in many quarters. Maybe that is because of the season or maybe people have little to add.
Andrew Sullivan's blog, currently being holiday-written by Clive Davis, has an evocative picture and a telling extract from Speer's prison jurnals.
Pictures also seem to be doing the work of thousands of words over on The Sharp Side, where he sums it up with these.
James Higham, at Nourishing Obscurity, brought the Bible to bear, in an understated way - a useful lodestone I think in an arena so dominated by both moral claims and ancient precedent.
Dick Jones, at his Patteran Pages, had explored the issue a day or two before the execution, starting with an apt quote from Gandhi: that, when asked what he thought of Western civilisation, replied that he thought it would be a good idea.
But Francis Sedgemore, trenchant as ever, has gone straight to the point of this barbarity, in both its political and its moral aspects, and its reflection on the part of the UK government as well as others. I particularly like his letter, at the end of his post.
Like Dr Sedgemore I was unedified by the sight of the dictator with a rope around his neck - I hope never to see anyone with a rope around their neck - just as I was appalled by the earlier pictures of him on his capture, and the pictures of his dead sons. Why do we not see that this kind of thing makes us no better than other people who rejoice to see murder carried out?
I too have declined to link to any of the news stories. The press is absolutely not doing justice to the gravity of this event, which is in fact a moral crisis for the civilised West. I will add that, precisely because the West - we - sat back and allowed Saddam to be (in Francis' words) such a "murdering bastard" it becomes us even less to be party to this bloodletting spectacle now that it's all too late. Of course, in a country with the death penalty Saddam would have hung for just one of the many murders he committed or sanctioned. I fail to see what we gain by putting him to death now, when it went so far beyond that.
It could have been a chance to change the terms of the discussion - which has to happen anyway, given the situation in Iraq, though who knows how that will escalate now. We could have risen above the sectarianism that's causing all the problems. We coulda been something.*
*(P-Ump - is that okay?)
Political Umpire has set me a challenge. It's a challenge I rather need to undertake anyway, sitting here in Baroque Mansions like a latter-day Miss Havisham mouldering among the crumbling artefacts of previous... (that's enough - ed.)
He challenges me to list my seven successes of 2006 - a year in which I lost my job, had one poem accepted for publication, got bumped off a major poetry project, only wrote about five decent poems, & stopped sending them out; turned an age I will not name, got circles under my eyes, & suffered much from a syndrome we can't even call empty-nest because the kids haven't officially reached any milestones,* they just never come home any more; failed (again! - my pathological hatred of Hackney Council) to keep up with my council tax, had misunderstandings with two friends, lost others in the undertow; fell over (in Somerfields, of all places), got some awful flu,** put on half a stone,*** had huge scary trouble (continuing) with my eyes, fell down some stripped-pine stairs (the Baroque knee is really bruised, six weeks in - I know - no pity), was tired the whole time,**** and did not meet a single nice man. Or a nice single man. There's been a lot of time at home by myself, which is not a great idea for Ms Baroque.
But hey! I just had a fab lunch in Upper Street and a major triumph at Phase 8 - everything half price - including a VERY flattering houndstooth-check (tiny, tiny checks, okay) suit jacket which will do a treat for my credibility at work (see below). (Actually, that jacket can be success #8.) Let these things be the fire from which my phoenix will spring in 2007.
So. MY SEVEN SUCCESSES
1. Starting this blog - like Political Umpire's #1. Getting it noticed (thanks). Discovering a World of Blogs, which is just as fascinating as other worlds and doesn't, unlike the "mainstream press"- as has been noted - confer an automatic aura of acceptability on febrile dross like this torrent of malice by Richard Littejohn in the Daily Mail. I've "met" wonderful new people through Baroque, established new connections, & had a laugh!
2. Writing criticism for Contemporary Poetry Review. I love it. When my article on Wendy Cope was published she said it was one of the best pieces on her work she'd ever read. I have a review up there now - for the next few days anyway - and a close reading of a Joseph Brodsky poem forthcoming, as well as two items in the pipeline. I'm interviewing Ruth Fainlight in the new year and am mighty pleased about it.
3. Getting the first job I interviewed for after being redundant. The job is a bit chaotic and feels hard, and I have yet to make what feels like a success of it, which pains me mightily; but the success of getting it still counts. The job itself can be a success in 2007.
4. Getting my niece over here for the first time ever last April, a feat which will be repeated this Easter. It's hard, living 3,000 miles from the family - especially as we are, for some reason, a non-travelling family. This was the first visit from home in about 13 years (yes!), & it was my idea.
5. Getting my hair the right colour. (I'm allowed this: it is a success. It's a great colour.)
6. Reading for Oxfam in November. This may sound like a small thing, but look: after months of all the above-mentioned ills, observe how our attention-starved egotist - I mean writer - crawls, grateful and blinking, out of the garret (okay, Mansion) and into the arena of an actual audience... I actually had to go and remind myself what poems I had and re-learn them. Some of the poems in the set had never been seen by anyone but me.
And, readers - I knocked 'em dead. It was a great line-up, I was reading with writers I admire, and their various positive responses to my work (read: the adulation of the crowd) bucked me up in a way I can't really even describe. Ms B is not a fraud! It really is poetry! Yay!
7. Giving my kids a wonderful, extra-Christmassy Christmas. We had the Urban Warrior's girlfriend here, whose parents oddly seemed not to be doing anything special, and even with no notice Santa gave that girl just as good a stocking as what les enfants Baroque got. And she had a present under the tree.
We had the Stollen and panettone and satsumas, and the giant clove-studded ham and the pumpkin pie, and candles all over the place and boughs of holly draped everywhere. It's still quite beautiful in here. Nana Baroque did not send the usual box of presents but instead, in the names of these and all the other family kids, donated to a charity called Heifer International an amount commensurate with an entire water buffalo and five flocks of chickens and ducks. The Baroque children were very amused & it was all a big success.
Their non-baroque Grandma died last year on Christmas Eve (which is the one we celebrate here, as they go to their dad on XMas Day) so this was a hard one. The ritual of it and our family traditions really did buoy the kids up along the anniversary. And I think joy despite sadness really is what Christmas is about. They've all said they had a really good one. That's a success!
This tagging thing drives me nuts. I write all these earnest lists only to read much funnier ones by other people who have avoided giving themselves away nearly so much. Well I'll just have to live with that. La comedie humaine, c'est moi. So I tag: Dave Hill (if not already tagged), Non-Working Monkey, my sis Leigh (you can just write in the comment box), Noosa Lee, Mark Granier, Ros Barber (as she shared one of my successes - and she was a knock-out), and Madame Arcati.
* note from future: see fact below, which had I known it I might not have said "stones"...
** note from future: gall stones!
*** see above
**** see above
Is this man like a poet? Are poets like cartoonists? Do you write better poems if you're "punch-drunk" with rejection? Are good ideas like gossamer (a word that figures on almost every list of taboo poem-words I've ever seen)? Do you need a clear vista to feel like a winner? What's funny? What's a good poem?
Perhaps we can learn from the example of the New Yorker cartoonists, possibly the only other group in the world as inured to rejection as poets. As described by Peter Carlson of the Washington Post,* the weekly selection process is more like a cull:
It's Wednesday afternoon and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, is picking cartoons. A few minutes ago, Bob Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor, entered Remnick's office carrying three wire baskets and 81 cartoons. The baskets are labeled Yes, No and Maybe. The cartoons are the ones Mankoff chose from the nearly 1,000 he received since the previous Wednesday's meeting. Now, with the help of Managing Editor Jacob Lewis, Remnick will decide which ones the magazine will buy.It continues:
Sound familiar? (We're disregarding the Shangri-La notion of an editor who cares whether you're waiting to find out, a weekly submission and an instant result.) But there is a point where it all turns into fantasy:No. Yes. No. No. Remnick picks up a cartoon of a corporate boardroom with a bunch of guys in suits sitting around a conference table with one chair occupied by a brain in a jar. The caption reads, "But first let's all congratulate Ted on his return to work."
" Ewwww!" Remnick says, half groaning, half laughing. "Bob!"
"It's great!" Mankoff says.
"It's horrible!" Remnick responds, laughing.
"What? A little brain in a jar?" Mankoff replies. "No animals were hurt in the making of this cartoon."
Remnick laughs. But he doesn't change his mind. "Not here," he says. It's a No.
Hey, wait a minute! Did you catch that? The guy laughs at the cartoon, but he still rejects it! It's good the cartoonists aren't watching. This would drive them crazy. Well, craz ier. Constant rejection has rendered these geniuses half nuts already. In about 20 minutes, Remnick rejects 48 cartoons and buys 33 -- that's 33 out of nearly a thousand that came in this week! It's hard out here for a cartoonist.
Just ask Matthew Diffee. At 36, he's one of the New Yorker's star cartoonists, creator of the classic drawing of Che Guevara wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt, which has become a hot-selling T-shirt itself. But the man is practically punch-drunk from repeated rejection.
Every Tuesday, like most of the New Yorker's four dozen regular cartoonists, Diffee submits a batch of about 10 cartoons.
"And if you're really, really funny that week," he says, "you'll sell . . . one cartoon! That's a 90 percent rejection rate."
On a bad week, the rejection rate is 100 percent.
Diffee started drawing cartoons in the late '90s, when he was living in Boston and failing to make it as an artist or a stand-up comic. His first cartoon won a contest sponsored by the New Yorker, and Mankoff encouraged him to submit more. For a year, Diffee submitted 15 cartoons a week, every week.At a bookshop event, Diffee gets asked if he gets frustrated a lot:"I sold four," he says.
That's four out of about 700.
The next year he did a little better. He sold eight.
Now, Diffee lives in Brooklyn and has a contract with the New Yorker, which buys about two dozen of his cartoons a year. He won't say how much his contract pays him -- and Mankoff won't reveal what the magazine pays for cartoons -- but he's getting by.
On Tuesday mornings, Diffee goes to Mankoff's office to drop off his latest batch and schmooze with the other cartoonists who've come to drop off their batches. A dozen or so will go to lunch at a restaurant called Pergola des Artistes and talk shop.
"If you expect a lot of one-upping each other in a Gag-o-Rama, you'd be disappointed," he says. "We have serious conversations on how to draw duck feet or whether a duck is funnier than a penguin. And there's a level of bitterness that we're not selling as much as we should."
Well, there we have it. Can the rest of us learn from this? Maybe - that the main thing is to keep hammering away at them, and that it's important to keep sending. And understand the editor. And that weekly session doesn't sound bad either."Yes, I get frustrated a lot," he admits.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "If you have a pessimistic outlook on life, you'll probably do better," he tells the kid. "If you think nine out of 10 of your ideas will be rejected, you'll work harder."
It's the power of negative thinking -- the perfect philosophy for New Yorker cartoonists and any other poor souls who are frequently clobbered by rejection.
I pinched this very foggy picture from the ever-delightful Non-Working Monkey, and hope soon to have taken one of my own.
The reason I can do that is that the fog (soon to be known as the Great Fog of 2006) is still with us. Fab East End blogger Diamond Geezer has written a Christmas tribute to it which is much the better for being seen, rather than just quoted from; but, as a taster, here's the first bit:
O little town of London Heathrow
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and endless fog
No silent planes go by
Yet in thy terminals endureth
An everlasting plight
The suitcased hordes from flights abroad
Are grounded in thee to-night
The wonderful Londonist has also paid tribute to our current prevailing weather conditions, pointing out that that quintessential Londoner Charles Dickens already did as much as can be done for fog. I'm just plain embarrassed not to have thought of this one.
Furthermore, the Londonist has linked to a quintessential game for Londoners: a "make your own Standard headline" website. You can keep playing: it's in my "things to make and do" list, blog right.
Ellis Sharp over at The Sharp Side just keeps on warming the cockles of my heart. It's hard to know which of his recent posts to quote from - the joy just goes on and on. But I'll start with the John Updike one, which goes in early with a graphic account of Updike's physical disgust towards women (I can justify this: in Updike, women are all about carnality just as hapless married blokes are about the spiritual quest. Thus, his corporeal disgust must be personified by the fair sex, etc etc...):
Ellis goes on to describe the novel, which he likes much more than it sounds as if I would, ending with this fantabulous conclusion. I say fantabulous because it has just added something to the way I think about Updike, even though I don't think I agree with the Sharp assessment of the book itself:It’s good to see an author of John Updike’s stature reviving one of V.I. Lenin’s favourite nouns, as in this complaint about the modernisation of Boston’s North Station:
A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten.
Worse, this is an age in which young women blow bubble gum:
In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.
There’s a lot about corporeality and disgust in Toward the End of Time (1997)...The deer which annoys the wife by eating plants in her garden is killed, its corpse graphically attended to, but human death is not addressed – more drowned out by noise, by wordiness, blanked and evaded by an omnipresent glitter.
But wait! There's more! You just have to read his blog. The Sharp Side offers no space for comments and lists no email address. You just have to know the guy. Which I don't. So, Ellis - if you're reading this! Ahem! (Which noun was it?)
In the midst of all the kerfuffle (or "vicious turf war") about who's more "real," blog reviewers or newspaper ones, this Wednesday a self-published children's author did an astonishing thing. He asked for his book to be taken off the amazon.com listings. George Walker's book, Tales From an Airfield, has appeared on amazon's listings without consent from him as either author or publisher. Quite rightly, Walker says that this is to the detriment of independent bookshops, which were already selling it just fine. Further, he says: "What they [amazon] are actually doing is getting the independents to do their market research."
Kind of like Starbucks, then! Very interesting.
And amazon's response? They now list the book as being "out of print or unavailable from the publisher." Nice, eh?
Read the article here.
**NOTE: the links issue with the previous post applies to this one too, which used to be part of the last one. I moved that to its own space for other, and equally boring, formatting reasons, which you can see below.
In fact, I'm simply irredeemably materialistic. I need regular treats or I can't be sure I'm alive. I am a woman of no substance. I've always said so, but people choose to believe that it's some charming conceit of mine. It's true that the brighter you shine the light on the grim truth, the more people laugh gaily and exclaim how witty, indeed how wonderful, you are.**And I will be thinking about her on Christmas Day itself, because:
The plan is to work on Christmas. The Poet is writing the index to his Guernica book and I'm writing a piece on virtual life for the LRB. We'll stop and eat some roast pork from time to time and then watch movies (or better still the CSI or Monk Christmas Special). And all around there will be that amazing peopleless silence of everyone having gone home to somewhere else. Perfect.This exactly - except for the Poet on hand to help eat the roast - mirrors my plans. The usual (at least for the past three years) plans having fallen through this time, once les enfants Baroque have gone chez Papa at about 11.30am on the day I will be seriously pampering myself - and with a bit of luck doing some proper writing.
Okay, inspired by Political Umpire, here are ten movies I've never seen. Maybe I'll see some of them this holiday season. (Warning: if you have a delicate constitution, maybe look away now. Some of them might be pretty surprising.)
1. Citizen Kane
2. Psycho
3. Godfather 2
4. Taxi Driver
5. Love, Actually (hurrah)
6. Blade Runner
7. Alien
8. Reservoir Dogs
9. Raging Bull
10. anything by Woody Allen in the past ten years
I'm sure there are more shocking things I've never seen, but such is my state of denial that I can't even think of them right now. To make up for that, I will list (only) ten movies I love:
1. The Philadelphia Story (about which I could go on for hours, speaking of Jimmy Stewart)
2. What's Up, Doc?
3. Goodfellas (lest I appear a lightweight)
4. The Godfather
5. North by Northwest
6. Casablanca
7. Swing Time
8. Guys and Dolls (but I love the books by Damon Runyon even more)
9. The Piano (sorry)
10. Pirates of the Caribbean
...and, for balance, and because I'm kind of in the swing of it now, ten I hate:
1. ET
2. The Hours
3. Don't Look Now (brilliant, but couldn't watch it)
4. Far From Heaven
5. The English Patient
6. Amelie
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
8. Damage
9. Pretty Woman
10. Life is Beautiful
England is under a thick fog. The airports are in chaos, with controllers limiting the number of take-offs per hour. Planes are sitting all over the runways and the trains out of town are packed: apparently tickets are selling out. If you're trying to go to Spain you're stuffed.
I've never really understood this English obsession with going places on planes, seemingly just for the sake of it. I just don't get it. Even les enfants Baroque can tell me instantaneously that "it is because of the English weather" - but I still don't get it. Relentless sunshine makes everything empirical and commands spurious perfection. And it hurts your eyes. Well, I guess it hurts my eyes.
Right now the traffic is creeping along, but in a nice way. As you walk along the road everything looks sort of soft, so that even Seven Sisters looks charming; the charcoal branches loom overhead like surprises, in unknowable relation to the red or green lights that hover near them, like baubles.
In the absence of stark detail everything that shows is a decoration.
And the people who come towards you on the pavement seem only noncommitally substantial: coming out of nothing they have to materialise before they can pass you. If you turned around afterwards you would see them gradually disappearing again; if you think about it you know you must be doing the same. This does raise a question about how substantial any of us were to begin with, and it has always been a slight sadness of mine that I could never see myself disappear in the fog.
Of course as a child I used to try. Spurred on by the promising adage 'it was so foggy you couldn't see your hand in front of your face' I used to walk to school on foggy mornings with my arm stretched out as far as it would go, trying to get my hand to go far enough away to vanish.
I have always loved fog.
This is one of my favourite movies ever: the original, and best, 1947 version of A Miracle on 34th Street, starring Maureen O'Hara and Natalie Wood.
In this picture everyone looks exactly as they should: the professional mum with cunning pleats in her padded shoulders, the impeccable, kind, handsome and single neighbour, the little girl in her smocked dress, and of course Kris Kringle himself: Santa, who loves the child in everybody. Look at his generous suit! His big square belt buckle is I think quintessential.
I've loved this film since I was tiny. The Christmas spirit I saw in it was that that if you believe, anything can happen. In recent years I've come to see that the real meaning of Christmas (and the 'message' of this story) is that even if you don't believe, the miracle can still happen.
In the movie, Doris Walker is so busy trying to prove herself to her bosses, bring up her child in a world that feels hostile, not get emotionally hurt, and generally keep the wolf from the door that she doesn't realise it's sitting in the house. Her ideological rationalism means she won't let her daughter really be a child about anything, and of course the emotionally hungry Susan Walker is simply a smaller and more expressive representation of her mother's emotional hunger. The mother's career in Macy's means the commercial angle of the season gives body to her acquired cynicism.
Enter Edmund Gwynn, as the man Doris hires to be her Macy's Santa. Kris Kringle, the kindliest and most twinkly man in the universe, uses the power of love to help Susan open her mother's heart and show her what she's missing.
Easy also to recognise this single mum who's been hurt in the past & can't afford to trust anyone, rely on anyone, take anything for granted or be taken for granted: can't allow anything to disturb the precarious balance of her little ecosystem. And easy to envy her forties grey flannel suits and dresses!
man, worried, in a cab
Last week I saw Anthony Minghella's new hymn to middle-class angst, Breaking and Entering. There's more to say about this film than I have time for, and possibly more than it deserves. So, after a nod to the great look of the thing - and why shouldn't it look great, Minghella has a fine eye for texture and has (under-)used some prime London locations - I'll move right along to the point.
(Yawn.)
My suspicion is that Minghella's heart (he's admitted in interviews that he's driven by the heart, not the head, which accounts for sloppy, cosy choices made throughout this film) may well be in the right place, as the film seeks to remind us that 'everybody isn't like us, you know, and some of them are actually quite cultured'. Hence the thieving boy who wants to be an architect, the gangster who doesn't lay a hand on him when he gets them caught, the brave Bosnian mum who plays her piano on a practice keyboard, the knock-em-dead-glammy prozzie who not only has a heart of gold but also (brilliant stroke!) pays for the cappuccino... and returns Jude Law's car with a fox puppet in it, after she's stolen (sorry, I mean borrowed) it. (The puppet is an in-joke: she's telling him to get in touch with his "wild" side. Of which she herself is an exponent. It's not exactly War and Peace, is it.)
The signifiers in this film were scarily blunt: the African cleaner suddenly, following a segue that practically doesn't exist, blurts out: "This is just like Kafka!" (And no it isn't; she's just showing off.) And there's a shot of the overcrowded (but quite tasteful) council flat occupied by Juliette Binoche - in the Brunswick Centre, an estate so lauded in architectural and design circles that it's the last place a real refugee could hope to be housed - which suddenly glances over a hefty biography of Stravinsky, sitting on a table. Um - twice. Once we see it, then it shows us Jude Law seeing it. The point must be that we, the viewer, are supposed to be surprised to see it, thus exposing our prejudices. Unfortunately for Minghella, as we the viewer have no particular prejudices in this regard, having carted lorry-loads of highbrow books from overcrowded flat to overcrowded flat for years, it only exposes his.
Of course we all know that London for different people, for different groups of people, is different cities. Jude Law's character (or anti-character, so bland is he) thinks it's merely arty to have an office in a warehouse by a broken fence down an alleyway behind Kings Cross station, and never realises that his skylights could be part of the problem. Is there really anyone in London as gormless as this? He trusts everyone. And although he is clearly very worried (see pic above), nothing really impinges on his comfort, material or emotional. This sounds fine, as characterisation, but there are worrying signs that the characterisation is in fact of Minghella.
Jude Law's character can well afford to be generous. The film is much more generous to him than to Binoche's character - notwithstanding her plucky bravery and European nobility of spirit. Near the end, his complacent mistreatment of her (on Stock Location Number Five, the top of Parliament Hill: a great place for a secret rendezvous!) becomes the most shocking thing in the film (because so believable and, frankly, so typical) - and his subsequent last-minute decision not actually to destroy her life along with her son's is portrayed as somehow heroic, generous, wonderful, rather than merely putting him back in the human race.
Of course it's all very sad, really: the Bosnian mother and son disappear without a word, scuttling into the teeming crowd. But we know they are about to go back to Bosnia, so they will be no future trouble to Law and his impossibly tall Scandinavian wife.
And of course, he may experience some discomfort over the fact that Binoche was only sleeping with him to try and blackmail him to protect her son, the (lovely, really) Artful Dodger who broke into the office. But ultimately it means that no matter how much of a shit Law is, it doesn't really matter because she didn't love him anyway.
His wife is a monster. I'm not sure that is really to the benefit of the movie; surely the obvious point that London can be a mean, hostile place would be more subtly - and forcefully- made if we were comparing immigrants and refugees with a normal middle-class woman, not a spoilt, vapid bitch? I do feel that giving her a character should have been the job of the filmmaker. As it was I was unable to tell if I was supposed to find her sympathetic on the grounds that 'money can't buy you happiness' or repellant, which in fact she was.
There are good touches. Binoche's styling and wardrobe betray precisely the desperate attempts at glamour of someone who doesn't stand a chance (tellingly, in the scene where she sleeps with Law, stripping down to a nylon slip and very functional bra), while the Scandinavian depressive has a wall of built-in wardrobe and can afford to wear boho-chic Converse. But is it overkill? Does anyone at all still wear those slips??
Over and over Minghella does this: hammers home an insight that was already obvious all on its own. You get the feeling he doesn't even realise what a big baby his character is.
It pains me to think that there is anyone as gormless as this couple actually living in this city. It pains me even more to think that Anthony Minghella may not have realised how gormless they really are. His film takes the safe, comfortable route every time there is a choice to be made, giving the council-estate women chic orange glass lamps and retro fittings, and allowing Law's babyishness to reside under a veneer of vague, respectable concern. Ultimately the middle-class viewer can, if he or she wishes, leave the cinema feeling pretty damn good for having spotted the Stravinsky.
And yet in movie terms these people may not be all that bad. The friend I saw it with expostulated afterwards: "You know, this could easily have been a Richard Curtis film."
The pre-show portrait - well, a mum can show off, right? Yesterday they went off to Brick Lane and Mlle B came back with vintage electric blue high heels. But she still hasn't done her Christmas shopping.
oh, and all around the house
poor Mummy was far more tired than any mouse.
Wet stockings were hung from the shower rail without much care,
in the hopes that the cleaner soon would be there.
Six adolescent girls had been jumping on the beds,
with the triumph of their school show blazing in their heads,
till long after midnight...
The school show was the most spectacular thing - moving, and lovely, with the kids of Stoke Newington displaying their beautiful musicianship in almost every genre of music you can think of. Mlle Baroque and her friends did their Santa Baby number so well - it was such a real highlight of the show - that Ms B was in tears of pride. My girls! Their solos went off with aplomb - Kitty opening the number like a pro & not a trace of nerves showing, Mlle B simply stupendous with her big, low, soul voice, and Natalie clear as a bell and justas lovely as one, despite how shy she usually is about singing. Naomi and Isabelle were great. They all danced well, were tight & rehearsed, and looked fab in red and black (leggings, little skirts, mini dresses, & what they now call "waist belts"), with red Santa hats on. All in all I was about fit to burst!
Mlle B is right: I am an ambarrassing mum. She was chagrined afterwards in the crowd of school parents - oh mummy stop it - but she was so excited her cheek was twitching, and please note that Natalie rushed up for a hug. They all came back here for a huge sleepover.
The boys weren't at the show but their friends were, and once again filled Ms B to the brim with maternal, Christmassy and proud feelings. These kids are so much more wonderful than any sugarplums.
Christmas, eh! No wonder we love it after all. Off to buy presents now.
lowering critical standards 200 years into the future: a
deplorable lack of responsibility for publicly promulgated opinions
The story that wouldn't die. Well, it might be dead, but I have got a new angle on it, which amuses me so I shall share it. James Marcus, a New York-based writer who for five years was senior editor at amazon.com, has sent me an article (now sadly offline) that he wrote two years ago for the Washington Post after a puff of wind blew up the skirts of amazon.ca, revealing the identities of its 'anonymous' reviewers.
Like all fresh air, this gust blows away some hoary old cobwebs. One of the main accusations I've seen hurled at internet-based reviewers, bloggers etc, is that they often hide behind "the anonymity afforded by the web,". But let's look at it for a moment. Even the most cursory glance round the top of my head reveals, for instance, its recent lodger Charles Lamb, who published his Essays of Elia under the name of - well - Elia. Samuel Johnson - another frequenter of the top of my head - cloaked himself in the veil of anonymity to write his great moral essays for The Rambler. And all his political pamphlets were anonymous.
Maybe this shocking moral laxness on Dr Johnson's part - two hundred years before the internet - accounts for the looseness of some of the definitions in his Dictionary? ("lexicographer - an irresponsible, cowardly, self-regulating drudge." Hmmm.)
the Canadian division of Amazon.com revealed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers. For just a few days in February [2004], until the company restored their electronic fig leaves, these stealth critics were effectively unmasked. For the most part, of course, this was no big deal. What difference did it make if "a reader from Saskatchewan" turned out to be named Keith -- and actually lived in Hoboken? Surely such minor mendacities could be forgiven. Maybe Keith was just shy, and longed for the Great White North.
Yet there were also some alarming discoveries to be made. A fairly large number of authors had gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues and paid flacks. A few had "reviewed" their own books. The novelist John Rechy, among those caught in flagrante, pleaded the equivalent of self-defense: He was simply fighting fire with anonymous fire. Other miscreants cited the ancient tradition of self-puffery, practiced by both Walt Whitman (who wrote not one but three unsigned reviews of Leaves of Grass, and quoted them all in the second edition)...
The other day Ms B's Christmas-shopping perambulations took her to a natural cosmetics shop called Lush, which beckons like the Emerald City of Oz to Mlle B and her friends. They love nothing more than a big powdery ball that turns their water blue, or leaves flower petals stuck to the side of the bathtub for weeks after. The shop looks as madly crowded and colourful as Munchkinland, with 'bath bombs' like giant sweets piled up everywhere, and it has to be smelled to be believed - of course Ms B quite likes it in there too.
Imagine her delight on seeing a tall heaped-up mountain of red, glittery, and satisyingly heavy-looking bath bombs called "Ruby Slipper." They are just so right. I can't really imagine wanting your bath to be full of red glitter, it would be all over the towels, and in the carpets for weeks, but that seems beside the point in the biggest way. They're £2.95 each, and if I had one I'd want to keep it forever.
Back in the crazy days of my childhood, when even third-graders (okay, just weird ones) understood the importance of reading the newspaper, I remember a story that caught me eye. MGM Studios was selling lots of old costumes and props to clear space in their warehouses, and Dorothy's ruby slippers were to be auctioned off. Yes: Dorothy's real, red, ruby, magic, Wizard of Oz slippers. The ones she really wore. The paper had a picture of the shoes. I didn't care about the picture: I had the shoes in my head. What amazed me was that someone could just, you know, buy them, it was like two different worlds coming together.
I followed the story, and later it emerged that the slippers had sold for a disappointingly unreal $15,000. They're now in the Smithsonian. And if you want to know more about ruby slippers than you ever thought possible (there's even a conspiracy theory), try here.
I still haven't forgiven Noosa Lee for her elegantly dressed Wednesday the other week, by the way. I so should have thought of that.
So, Orhan Pamuk has given his Nobel speech at Sunday's prize-giving ceremony in Stockholm. It's quite a moving speech, and gets at some of the fundamental things about being a writer, what it means both to a person and about a person.
I won't simply refer to the person as 'he', as Pamuk did; that would be simply eccentric, as I am patently a 'she'. Oddly, this quality leapt out at me when reading the speech, as it also did when reading his very beautiful book Istanbul. I digress purely to reiterate the point (which seems like it should be a truism these days) that women can be just as intellectual and serious and have just as much a vocation as men. Of course, we all know this. Right? But then, I've had some shocking experiences. I'm sure you can imagine them in type, if not in exact kind. And I'll spare you the details.
Now, there was a thing I read earlier this year when researching an interview that never happened, where the Irish (& naturalised American) poet Greg Delanty told Brian Lavery (for an article in the Sunday Times, which seems now not to be online) about his youth: "I wanted to write poems and that was it, and I put my head down and I’ve stayed true to that." That line struck me, hard. Of course, it could be said that Ms B has not stayed true to that. It never seemed to be what life wanted of her, and to achieve it she had to pretty much throw away her life. (I'm sure there's a Bible quote or something about that, isn't there? About throwing away and getting?)
There have been long, long periods of what one might call writer's block. In my teens I wrote but never thought of being good enough to send anything off. It just didn't seem like something I could really even aspire to, for some odd reason - despite la famille Baroque being chock-full of visual artists. No one wrote. No one even read the way I did. A journal entry as late as age 21 refers to me needing to get on with "my work," but even the journals stop shortly after that; it was a bad relationship.
Actually, it was. Art was "pretentious". Fiction was "pointless". Poetry was "snobbish" and even my poor friends were "poncy" and "middle-class". Picasso was, according to my father-in-law of the time, "a great artist - a great con artist, that is!" ("Har, har, har!") But somehow I managed to keep my instincts, 3,000 miles from home, in a city where I knew no one to speak of (and it wasn't a good time to be a young girl trying to write, if you were serious: I was no Jeanette Winterson - no Martin Amis (not that he's a girl, mind) - and certainly no Julie Burchill). I got a job in the Penguin Bookshop in Covent Garden (remember? that was a great shop) and in the four years I worked there I met many writers. That was at least something, and it is something to draw on even now in one's Baroque existence.
I had a strange exchange with a famous novelist. He asked me: "And do you write?"
I replied, in these exact words, "oh good heavens no!"
His eyebrows went up. "Why...?"
"Because I have absolutely nothing whatever to say," I replied.*
Well, the monkey never went away. But I couldn't have written a thing to save my life - I was too busy, as it happens, trying to save my life. I remember that time as one of acute discomfort in every aspect.
So, Delanty goes on, saliently, "I said I was going to be a great poet, because you’re arrogant as a young fella. But you have to be a bit arrogant to take it on."
And there you go.
Anyway there's a lot more to it than that, clearly. But my point is that the path was never that clear for some of us. I couldn't "stay true to that" in that way of having professors, being fostered by my elders, and writing, and sending off, and given prizes or fellowships. I couldn't stay true because I really felt there was no place for me in the infrastructure. Or there was no room, in me, for the infrastructure. But was I untrue?
Cut to several years later when, with three under-fives, I was trying to write a novel. I still have it, by the way - unfinished, but bits of it are very funny. Mr not-very-Baroque was getting a bit uncomfortable with the situation (which involved writing workshops, unwashed dishes, and me reading the TLS on holiday in the Lakes instead of admiring the mountains as we drove endlessly along ), and one day he turned to me in the kitchen and said: "I do hope you're not going to dedicate your life to literature, or anything like that."
I said: "Why wouldn't I? I always have."
And then, after the divorce, another five whole years.
So when Pamuk talks about his father's suitcase, I feel shamefully as if it is my suitcase he's talking about. He talks about his father liking life and people too much to shut himself in a room and write all day. He talks about his father not wanting to make the sacrifices necessary to be a 'real' (my word, I think) writer. But he also talks of his father's attempts, his trips to Paris where he sat "filling notebooks" in a hotel room, and the strange expression he would get on his face, which even as a child Orhan knew was 'discontent' - the discontent, he says in his speech, that makes a writer. His father, like me, felt that the suitcase was a very important thing. And where Pamuk says that most of what being a writer is about is perseverance, he may be right.
But I can't help feeling as if it's something more than just perseverance.
* Of course he was only propositioning me. At a reading recently this same writer - now old - turfed up with a book of poems about his undying love for his deceased wife/partner of many years - and a new wife, who cannot be one single day over 32. In the restaurant after the reading I asked her what she does, and she became very flustered and replied, "I'm his wife." Thinking she had misunderstood my question, I said, "yes, I know - what do you do - do you write too?" She said: "I look after him," and her face filled with shamed confusion.
Did I say I was pretending to be Courtney Love at last week's Hollywood-themed party? Just before I fell headlong down the stripped-pine stairs? (The bruises are still quite bad, thanks; my lip is healing up pretty well. I can wear lipstick now, which is the main thing, it hides the scab.) (But the rest of me looks like crap, I'm so flipping tired.)
Because after today's article in the Guardian (you know, I do think sometimes that the Guardian should pay me a fee of some kind - the number of links! - & it is a bit embarrassing. I even live in Stoke Newington. Next it'll be the Camper shoes) I can tell you this for nothing: I'm never going to have lips like hers. What has she done to them?!?? I'll need some falsies next time. Even splitting them open didn't get mine to that size.
Still, she's a poet.
The bit I do like is where it says that when Courtney was 12 she was turned down for the Mouseketeers, after reading a Sylvia Plath poem for her audition. Let's imagine that for a minute: there's little Courtney, just at that awkward age. Her mother has made her put on something nice, "something nice" and off she has gone with, perhaps, a little illicit mascara or blue eye shadow on. She stands on the stage. The ladies and men wait expectantly. Around her are props: Mickey ears, banners. Other children are to be seen anxiously reciting under their breath: "m-i-c... k-e-y..."
Courtney clears her throat, as her mother watches, and begins:
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ----
I'd gone to sleep depressed. I woke up depressed. Another night of sleep so deep you hardly even know when it's morning. The dreams fly thick and fast, in the form of movies. That means they're important. It seems that when the Baroque unconscious really really wants to call notice to something it puts it in the form of a movie: endless rewind, endless replay.
Years ago I had a dream that was almost entirely made up of a bit of footage, played endlessly over and over and over, about a girl, a stream, some woods. There was no action: just this series of still images. On film. It was one of the most terrifying dreams I ever had, and in the morning I had no idea who to tell about it. I thought maybe I should talk to my friend the film critic.
So last night I had a film about a proud and doting father whose daughter is descending down a wide, opulent flight of red-carpeted stairs inside an opulent home (get it - opulent/opposite...). The film is about the girl going off to university. See, it's the empty nest, kids-growing-up scenario. Clearly Ms Baroque has some inner script about how it's 'supposed to be' - which is odd, the Baroque existence having been pretty much made up from scratch. The subtitle to the film was about encouraging kids to live in new places, as only then can they thoughtfully come back to Stoke Newington. The film titles clearly said: Stoke Newington. Isn't that cute?
The Urban Warrior (now over 6' tall) flew to Rome wiv 'is mates the other evening - the day of the cyclone in Kilburn. At 5pm when his plane was due to be taking off there was a howling gale in Victoria, with heavy objects crashing into buildings behind us - but the clouds were so thick we couldn't see... I was on the live flight info page at Stansted Airport, and apparently all was well. Airborne at 5:36. And although the brat had promised to text me when he got there, and assured me he would have access to email at this mate's family's place (or wherever they're staying) (text: "this isn't actually Imran's number. I just have instructions to ask politely for Imran" - at least he spells out his texts!), there's been not a peep since.* But I'm sure they're busy. He's with just a few dozen of his closest bruvs. Safe.
So I got up, read some poetry that popped like magic through the letter box, wrote three poems really fast (first drafts of course), went into the kitchen and made the famous pancake sleepover breakfast for four girls.
Now the cleaner's due, the laundry must be done, the girls are rearranging the doll's house, and the Blond Rock God has promised to help me dismantle the top bunk & move some furniture around this afternoon.
My hot tip of the weekend: it seems that what they're all saying about Jacob Polley's collection Little Gods is true: buy it.
*Note: got through on mobile. He says, "haven't really checked the email yet. Did you get my text? Windy here, we're climbing a hill. Yeah man this is a crazy city. Ya know those pictures, with those weird buildings? It all looks like that. It's great. And the weather's cool. Yeah, everyfing's cool, most people aren't even here yet. They're coming today. We brought four mattresses over from the hotel. Listen, I gotta go, my pizza's here."
... but this time it's the magazine. Its article on Frederick Seidel begins:
“If Modigliani had painted Gerald Ford, the result might look a little like Frederick Seidel. The man is sumptuous. He hangs on the edge of a red-leather banquette behind his regular corner table at Cafe Luxembourg, cradling a second espresso, and his ash-colored suit—made to measure by Richard Anderson of 13 Savile Row—fits so perfectly that it looks like it was dusted onto his slender frame with a box of confectioners’ sugar. More excellent still is Seidel’s voice. When he says “past” it comes out “pahst.” His friend Diane Von Furstenberg had it right when she told me “Fred is a very luxury man.”Read on. It puts him in a slightly different light from the one I had him in, even though his website is so beautiful.
picture courtesy of The Gothamist. Click on it to make it big enough to read.
To give peace a chance you can also read (and maybe sign) The Euston Manifesto and the New Generation Network.
Sorry, this is out of date already. Baroque in Hackney never posted on the recent kerfuffle about literary blogs, online reviews and the hallowed halls of the Books Pages, but those of you who frequent the blogosphere will know that Ms B couldn't resist commenting on it absolutely everywhere. It got a bit embarrassing.
Well, to embarrass myself again, it seems that critic John Sutherland's original piece from the Telegraph, the one that started the whole cyclone spinning in the teacup, has been available online for over a week. Now I've read it, which (in typical blogger fashion, I can hear Sutherland saying now) I hadn't before. (Mind you, if Ellis Sharp from The Sharp Side is to be listened to - notwithstanding he's a blogger - that scruple needn't worry me overmuch.)
The article is mostly about the reviews that readers write for eg Amazon. Sutherland feels these people have too much power, a power he cites as being able to "move books." They do it through psychokinesis, without, apparently, knowing much about books, or honouring the Reviewers' Code ('more like guidelines') which makes paid reviewers back up their assertions with knowledge and quotations. One such inflated personage is a man apparently listed as amazon.com's 250th-ranked reviewer! Ms B feels giddy just thinking about it. Naturally Baroque Towers is beautiful, but it is not yet quite so lofty as all that.
What puzzled me was the reaction online, among bloggers who are also professional writers, publishers etc, who seemed - wilfully, it appeared to me - to ignore the fact that they were signally not who Sutherland had in mind, and to take enormous personal offence at what he had written - even citing their educational and publishing credentials, though that sits oddly with the brutal populism of which they are accused. The phenomenon of professional or published writers and critics blogging away in their off hours has not been addressed at all in the "real" press, that I know of. I guess it makes little odds; if a powerful (though not amazon-registered) critic is saying that all e-criticism is tosh, one has to stick up for one's fellow byte-sized wryters. It's noble, and it is a Code of a different sort.
Anyway, I followed the whole thing all over the place, - at Susan Hill, the Tart of Fiction, and normblog, and Me and My Big Mouth, and other places too, I'm sure - piping up about the importance of critical analysis as a beacon of good living, and the spuriousness of any People's Revolution based on mere opinion (well, I didn't put it quite like that)*, and basically stuck up for silks and velvets and buckles on our shoes. The debate was a bit vitriolic, and when Rachel Cooke published this piece in the Observer she made it even worse. But much of the offence she caused was based on the fact that - like all the other commentators before her - she completely failed to distinguish between what is trying to sell books and what is trying to analyse art. (She did say, among other things, that there is nothing in a literary blog that is even one-millionth as good as anything in Nick Hornby's new book - I forget what it's called. And she wrote that in the Observer. So it must be true.)
Sutherland and Cooke are both right, of course, when they say we need, badly need, and can't do without, the art of critical analysis. Literature is borne aloft on criticism, in the same sense as Socrates' dictum about the unexamined life being not worth living. And as literature is about, and is a synthesis of, life, it does sort of follow that deep, perceptive, nuanced criticism of it will cast a glow of understanding on our quotidian existence. You know - durrr.
"Moving" books is another. Clearly it is to be lauded if it gets people interested in reading literature and living an examined life, and all that - though Ms Baroque has never bought the whole philosophy that it is better to be reading anything at all, no matter what, than to be doing anything else at all. I read Main Street; I couldn't bear to finish it. Simply enthusing about books is another. Anyone who likes them can do that. And stabbing authors in the back with specially sharpened 'reviews' is yet another. But does no one do that in the papers?
Anyway, the reason I am writing all this now is that I have just - yes, behind the times - read a very comprehensive and satisfying account of the whole fracas, over at the complete review's Literary Saloon.
*I think the great anarchist Emma Goldman said something like "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution"; and Jessica Mitford got in trouble with the Communist Party in California in the forties for wearing hats and gloves when she leafleted on their behalf. You know, I love that people can start their own blogs and write about books! I just can't stand it when they punctuate badly.
"The Irish poet Dorothy Molloy’s first collection, Hare Soup, was widely reviewed as being her both first and last book: aged 62, she had died of liver cancer just a few weeks before its publication in January 2004. Now, however, we have a second collection, put together from the poems unpublished at the time of her death, many of them about the illness itself—notably the title poem, in which she awaits lab results (and presumably a prognosis)."
And now we also have Ms Baroque's review of it, published today in the December issue of the US-based Contemporary Poetry Review.
This may not look like such a huge achievement, but Ms B is here to tell you that she carried that book around for months in her effort to get this piece finished! Some years are just like that.
And now it happens that, due to some confusion over whether Molloy died in December 2003 or January 2004, my article now says she died in January 2003! I will get that fixed. And in the mean time, the rest of the piece is true.
Isn't he lovely? Imagine you can hear Autumn Leaves playing as you look at this picture. My hero.
Little Mlle Baroque has been busy lately with a particularly pointless assignment for her music teacher, Ms Philips: writing out five pages on various genres of jazz. She's been given the names of the genres, knows nothing whatever about them, and is researching them on the internet. They haven't heard any of the music in school. We're downloading a bit as we go.
The stupid thing is that this is a kid who loves music. She adores Ella and Chet and Billie, plays Dean Martin constantly and has never stopped singing since I rented the DVD of Hello Dolly: she absolutely idolises Louis Armstrong. ("Mummy," she says, "who originally did I'm Puttin' On My Top Hat - Louis Armstrong or Doris Day?" "Fred Astaire," I say. Rolling eyes: "I know - but of those two, who was first?" Why? "Kitty says it's Doris Day, she lo-oves the Doris Day version, but I keep telling her I think it was Louis Armstrong!" Then: "I don't think Doris Day's that interesting....")
We listen to a lot of swing in our house. But swing isn't on her list. She has bebop, but not Hard Bop (which is what comes up if you google bebop, unless you get the words just right), so she was flummoxed. I had to talk her through it. So she has a list of names, including John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, etc, but has she listened to them? No; she's too anxious about getting her paper done in time.
At least this assignment is better than her last one: five pages on salsa music.
Ms Philips! Why can't you give our kids more elegant lessons?
... but I liked it! A spam title header this morning:
when shakespearean so marlene
Germaine Greer has figured in the Halls of Baroque before; now she's here again, but this time she's making sense. As Noosa Lee over at That's So Pants puts it, it looks as if Professor Greer's been "reacquainted with her old self." Hurrah!
Now, I'm delighted to be fed this opportunity because the thing Dr Greer is making a fuss about, in her old cogent way, is also a busily buzzing bee in the le chapeau baroque: it's me old muckers the Plain English Campaign. They've given her a "Golden Bull" award - apparently, the 'Plain English' equivalent of being hustled off to Pseud's Corner without even a dunce's stool to sit on.
According to her article in today's Guardian, she was given the award for her sentence, "The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold," which occurs in a limpid & delightful piece of art criticism called (also in the Guardian) Here's a message for the art mafia in their black Bentleys: the really good stuff is uncollectible.
The whole trouble with the Plain English Campaign is that they've forgotten that English is a glorious and manifold language in which a lot more happens than dictionary definitions. In my work I often come across their horrible "Crystal Mark" awards - every good organisation wants one - which denote plain, 'understandable' written communications. The problem is that much of what passes for 'plain' English is in fact not 'good' English, as they flatten vocabulary and knock grammar about in their "fight" for the level playing field they think primer English is.
I myself have received letters, eg from banks and similar, which, though they bore the Crystal Mark, mangled the language in their vain attempt to make it 'easier' than in fact it is (or should be: words do have a use!). Replacing a word with something that doesn't quite mean the same thing, just because it's shorter, is not 'plain'! It's just stupid.
On their website you can download a large-ish pdf giving substitute words and phrases for things they think are too hard. Here are a couple of examples:
Replace "correspond" with "write"
Replace "cumulative" with "added up","added together"
Replace "accommodation" with "where you live", "home" (had enough yet?)
Replace "consumption" with "amount used"
Replace "exempt from" with "free from"
Now, I'm all for using fewer ("less"?) Latinate words, simplifying things a bit. One can but approve their campaign against indirect verbs, obfuscation, unnecessary verbiage. But things are bad enough these days, with people having forgotten grammar and syntax, without driving vocabulary underground too. (Or, as I like to ask myself sometimes, "What Would Dr Johnson Say?" Let's give ourselves a moment here to imagine him stamping his stick on the ground with full force and roaring with disgusted impatience; I wish I could think what he'd call them. Suggestions below, please.)
Greer's point is that the phrase "unsynthesised manifold" has a meaning as a phrase, which contains history and association and is larger than the mere meaning of the words it's made of; and that its meaning can't be expressed by a paraphrase in fewer syllables. At least, based on her crystal (geddit?!?)-clear explanation, I imagine she means something like that. That's what I'd mean if I'd written her article. The Plain English Campaign has clearly forgotten that levels of discourse still exist in which they have no part, in which the delight of language itself exists as a key to meaning and in which ideas must be expressed through nuance.
She also looks a little like Mama Baroque, which can only be a good thing.
On Saturday Christmas had started with a swing down in Hackney Central. With my best friend Ms Rational Self-Determinism I went to a craft fair in Sutton House, our local National Trust property dating (in parts) from Tudor times, full of oak panelling, wide old floorboards and homemade jewellery stands. (Legend has it that the top floor is haunted by a little dog. I've never seen it; nor have Les Petites Baroques, who have of course had more school trips to Sutton house than I've had hot dinners (in Sutton House, I mean; they do a slap-up roast there for £6 on a Sunday).)
Moving on from there, mercifully without any new jewellery, we couldn't resist the Narrow Way. Partly this was because Ms R S-D needed to pick up her boots from the menders; partly it was because, well, it's there. And let me tell you it is now officially Christmas.
The pound shop was full of both things that cost a pound and people, who were themselves bursting with armfuls of foil decorations. Ms R S-D was particularly struck by a candle of which the outer bit was imitation leather - very dark brown, with pocks. "The ex Mr R S-D might like this," she said. "I haven't even got him a birthday present yet." She went on, "I can really see this in his home," turning it in her hand to display the extreme waxiness of the pocked layer.
"He might like it better if it had a label on it saying HEAL'S," I said.
She looks at me for a slow minute, and then goes, "I could make one." Looks at me again and just puts the candle back. So that was done, then.
Or did she buy it? I stopped paying attention. Hal, if you're reading this, it's still a mystery, honey!
Then, stomachs still warm from the mulled wine we'd bought from the elderly volunteers in the Victorian-herb-filled kitchen, we had lunch in the best that the Narrow Way can offer: Hackney MacDonalds. Ohh, I've missed that place. Fortunately this time there was no racist abuse going on, and the manager did an excellent job of managing the queues. It was crowded like the bar at a rock gig.
But the thing I loved the best about the Narrow Way this Saturday was the saxophonist. He was a 30-something black guy with short dreads, a black leather cap, shiny black boots ("look, he's wearing his Santa boots!") and an all-black outfit. He was practically impossible to see in the crowd but the whole place was full of his music: "Ding Dong Merrily on High," he played, over and over. But it was a work in progress: every time he got to the "Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ria" bit the saxophone faltered beneath his fingers and the whole thing dropped an octave and then another, like a boy whose voice is breaking, before suddenly squeaking back up to the original register, and well, in short, it was fab. I didn't laugh out loud till the third or fourth time I heard it happen and he just stopped playing, with an exclamation, held the sax away from him and just looked at it. Shrugged, and started playing again.
I'd rather that guy than any piped carol music any day! Merry Advent.
For years I've had a sort of alternate reality in my head, in which I never settled in London, and instead did the more predictable thing and went to live in New York, the city I was conceived and born in, and whose identity is in so many weird ways still my own. The Gothamist has tapped into this by alerting me (via a link, of course, from The Londonist) to this full-page ad Yoko Ono has taken out in the New York Times - a paper I would have read in that other universe. (I do sometimes do that email-subscribe thing with the NY Times, because of the book reviews etc, but really - there is a limit to what one's groaning inbox can hold.)
Well, I was a teenager when John Lennon was shot. At the time that was the ultimate New York event, and I was tearfully grateful when my friend Charlene, who lived on the Upper East Side, went to the Dakotas and put a white rose on the railings for me. To this day I've never gone back to see that building - I prefer my mental image of it, which contains mostly my white rose - but for years after there was a certain (increasingly tedious) point in any evening when I would begin to talk about that day. (I bought every single paper that morning, and had to rise above reality to take a French test less then two hours after hearing the news. The French teacher, a 24-year-old girl from Paris called Isabelle, asked me if she could look at my papers while we did the test, and she sat there with tears running down her cheeks while we conjugated our verbs and parsed our passages...)
It's hard now for me to reconnect with what a terrible shock that was, how unthinkable, how it actually did split my world open. It was the first, definitive, cold blast of mortal reality into my idealistic adolescent world. Since then there have been other deaths which have shocked me deeper than that one - people I was close to and loved and couldn't manage without. Those deaths are physical experiences and knock the death of anyone you never knew personally into a different space.
But Yoko's ad does, as The Londonist says in its headline, "bring it all back." Remember?
I wonder if we're ready for a bit more idealism yet.
Pauline Fowler is due to leave the series in an "emotional Christmas episode" - maybe her son Martin will murder her when he finds out she's lying about having a brain tumour!
Do we think Dot's ominous cough presages something untoward, or do we think it's a red herring? I certainly hope it is a red herring. I love Dot. And if she got sick and died from this cough she'd have been murderd by Ian Beale - remember that. Think how tedious and depressing that storyline would be.
And, for nothing, here's my prediction. A lot of poor souls have been accessing Baroque in Hackney off Google searches for info on Jake Moon. We all want to know.
Well, my analysis, if you can glorify it with that word, is this: the BBC put it about that Jake's death, although "family friendly" and involving no actual on-screen violence, would leave viewers in no doubt that he was dead as Marley's ghost and would never be coming back in earthly form. So, duly, Jake is seen being hustled by two hit-men who have been wrongly informed that Johnny Allen's dying wish was to see him dead. Well, in my experience, the producers of EastEnders have never been shy of disturbing scenes, and we faithful viewers are only too aware of the amazing comeback, two years ago, of Den Watts. When a character dies we now know we need hard evidence.
My view - probably a completely wrong and misguided one, based on nothing, as I don't read the soap mags (and certainly have no aspirations to write a serious EastEnders blog!) - is that, with Ruby now almost officially insane and abandoned by all who love her - indeed having spurned them, so that she is now unstable and alone - the only thing that can now happen in that storyline is for Jake to reappear.
Which I tentatively predict that he will.
Maybe around Christmas time.
And if he doesn't, at least it was a good idea! Right?
Last night I went to a party. Hurrah! It was the first proper party I've been invited to since July, and thrillingly it was only in Finsbury Park, so I could even rely on getting a cab back. IIt was also the first christmas party of the season... who could resist.
I've been very, overwhelmingly, baroquely, weirdly tired all week.* No; for weeks and months now. I thought I might be too tired to go to the party, but it was being given by some work colleagues, and it was on a theme of "Hollywood" - a badly-needed chance to glam it up, in other words - and it is my "weekend off", so what luck! And I do believe in the rule that if you're tired you need to just get out and get the juices flowing. It's not as if I hadn't just spent a solid week lying on the couch with my eyes closed.
On Friday while I was still at work Little Mlle Baroque rings and says, "Are you going to be in tonight?" Um, ye-es... life's not that thrilling just yet... "Good," she says. "Can I come round and get nit-combed?" So she arrived at Baroque Mansions, instead of going to her dad's, which meant I was once again in Morrisons thinking about dinner, and then she had a bath while the spuds cooked and then we had the nit-fest, and by then it was so late she just stayed. Saturday was the usual exotic round of cleaner, errands, shopping in the Narrow Way with my best friend (we do such fun things together!) and laundry-sorting. Mlle B was here with her friend Kitty till so late that I ended up taking them all the way to Kitty's on the bus rather than let them go alone.
By the time I got back home I had something like an hour to have a bath and get ready for this party, so I threw on some sparkly earrings, red lippy and my lovely black heels from Office, straightened the crucial front bit of my hair, and went in turned-up jeans & a purple lace shirt. I had to do my make up in the cab, in the pitch black, trying to see by the streetlights as they whizzed past. The cabby was laughing himself sick (& the maquillage was impeccable).
Hollywood! People do make such an effort, they do dress up and it was fabulous. I'm serious: there were girls there who'd spent the afternoon in the hairdressers, including one in a beautiful spotty dress with a veiled hat and a Marcel wave! Marilyn was there, Jay Gatsby, Sky Masterson, Columbo, a porn star from the seventies, a few starlets in LBD's and big sunglasses, someone in gold sequins and someone (more futuristic) in eighties silver sequins. I passed myself off as Courtney Love with dyed dark hair.
All was well until 2am, when my cab arrived. I was fine at the top of the stairs; it was only about six steps from the bottom that the trouble started. The staircase in my colleague's flat goes straight down, steeply, but with an odd hiatus in the proceedings. I can't call it a typical landing (as indeed I did not have a typical landing at the bottom of it), because it doesn't have a turn; it just stops being stairs for three feet, and then suddenly starts being stairs again just when - if it's 2am and you've been drinking all night and you're in 4in heels - you least expect it. Honestly, I don't think it was the heels. I think I just didn't see the six bottom steps. I'd have fallen even in trainers.
So there I am, lying at the bottom of these stripped-pine stairs with blood dripping onto my jeans and the stripped-pine floor, and people suddenly appear all over me, taking my shoes off, helping me back up, cosseting me with ice & feeling the top of my head for bumps... The cab is sent away, I'm told to stay a while to make sure I don't start raving insensibly, and Nicola in the gold sequins makes so many jokes that I keep laughing which just makes my mouth bleed even more. Dear me. I eventually manage to get another cab, get home at 4am, and wake up at noon with a fat, split lip and bruises coming up all over me. Even my shoulder. Who ever has a bruise on their shoulder??
At least this time I can say I was pretending to be Courtney Love. At least this time I wasn't in Somerfield's! But I shall now endeavour not to fall over any more.
And after a quiet day today, I can go to work tomorrow and get quietly back to just being tired all the time.
* note from the future: this turns out to have been the gall stones! Who knew.
